Re-acclimating to the tiple -- ouch

uke4ia

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I'm trying to make some use out of a couple of instruments that I've had for decades that usually sit untouched. So last night I restrung my tiple for the first time in years, and tonight I sat for an hour playing it. And right now the fingertips of my left hand are like raw meat. The strings require so much pressure to make a chord compared to any of my ukuleles, even though my tiple has a low action. I'm torn between playing for another half hour, and waiting till tomorrow to see if I get blisters. So I'm compromising -- I'm typing online for a while, and then I'll play some more. :p

I wonder whose idea it was that a tiple was going to be a ukulele alternative. On uke, no matter how much I play I never develop calluses. I can strum with the meat of my thumb or the nail of my pinky, no problem. But 10 metal strings, that's a whole nuther beast.
 
D'oh! :eek: :eek: :eek:

Turns out it becomes much easier on the fingers when you don't tune two of the wound strings an octave too high. I somehow tuned the low C and E strings to the same octave as the high C and E strings. I'm surprised they didn't break. When I tune it the right way, it gets much easier to press the strings down. Go figure.

I'm gonna go hang my head in shame now.
:wallbash:
 



I'm taking a few days off this week to celebrate surviving a year since my heart attack and triple bypass. I think I got enough footage for a video project I have early this afternoon. So after that I tried recording a little bit with the tiple. This video includes me playing the Procol Harum song "Homburg" and the Alan Parsons Project song "Home". The tuning on the tiple seems to change second to second, and not only moves flat and sharp (sometimes both at once) but into other dimensions previously unknown to science.
 
Congratulations on the cause for celebration and thanks for the video- you are right the darn thing is still stretching those poor strings into dimensions we will not understand for at least decades, but it sure sounds cool- Kind like the Ukulele for Roger McGuinn ;) You probably need a sack of stones to carry around to play that thing without a pick- looks like a cheese grater
 
I tried takes with the pick and without it, and it worked at least as well without the pick. It's easy enough to strum with your fingers as long as you don't have to do a really fast strum. It's harder on the left hand than the right. I'm finding simple things like the F chord to be tricky -- I have to put my index finger in a different spot than I'm used to, to get all three E strings.

zac987, it's a Yasuma tiple. My understanding is that they made Martin copies until Martin sued them and made them stop.
 
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